This guy was reportedly Jerry Garcia's biggest influence. Forget Freddie King. I read several interviews with Jerry extolling Stoneman's brilliance. A member of the famous and very musical Stoneman family, he was called the Jimi Hendrix of the fiddle.

I get my improvisational approach from Scotty Stoneman, the fiddle player. [He’s] the guy who first set me on fire — where I just stood there and I don’t remember breathing. He was just an incredible fiddler. He was a total alcoholic wreck by the time I heard him, in his early thirties, playing with the Kentucky Colonels… They did a medium-tempo fiddle tune like ‘Eighth of January’ and it’s going along, and pretty soon Scotty starts taking these longer and longer phrases — ten bars, fourteen bars, seventeen bars — and the guys in the band are just watching him! They’re barely playing — going ding, ding, ding — while he’s burning. The place was transfixed. They played this tune for like twenty minutes, which is unheard of in bluegrass. I’d never heard anything like it. I asked him later, ‘How do you do that?’ and he said, ‘Man, I just play lonesome.’ (Jerry Garcia, c. 1985, via Blair Jackson’s Garcia: An American Life)

Taken from the 2003 box set. The piano player, Robert Lamm, is my Mom's sister's second husband's son from his first marriage...who ran away from home when he was 16 to ....rock 'n' roll! There...all my claims to fame have been miserably exhausted. We can make it happen, YEAH!!

This is a song that just won't quit haunting me. I can't seem to drink in its vision fully ....to finally render it merely nostalgic. My mind always takes me to my childhood home in Hawthorne...out on the front lawn...watering the weeds...and enjoying the cool South Bay breezes on hot summer nights. There were yuccas, too ...and a banana tree...rustling. There's a message for me in that place and time...but 54 years of living has left me bereft of its full meaning. For youz...this version features Jobim singing in English...so you can play along. Remarkable how its power suffers so little in the translating. Jobim is especial.

Testing out using Google Drive to upload my mp3 files. YouTube's copyright policy seems too dicey. If the volume is too low, please tell me. Nothing I can do about it, unless there's some way to configure the cheesy little player(?). The beauty in this recording of one of my favorite symphonies is in the brass section. The plucky little Scottish Symphony Orchestra doesn't have the precision of the other top world class ensembles, but I happen to like how the engineer achieved the cacophonic effect in the horns. Nice rumbling, rambling, sloshiness. I always imagine when I listen to romantic symphonies that, back in the day, Germans especially would've been hammered when they went out to their music halls ...so manly, aggressive sounds might've been the rule. Today's players are gutless wimps, basically, which tends to give classical music a bad name in certain circles. Though, many say that this feminization of orchestras didn't happen until the last few decades. Enjoy. If anyone is interested in hearing the remaining three movements, please speak up, and I'll upload those, too.NOTE: Discovered that player fast-forward doesn't work.

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